I’m gonna answer the question in my headline in very literal terms, just to get that out the way before anyone decides to comment “it’s this, duh”: Secret Level exists for IP expansion, and money. That’s it, that’s almost definitely the real reason, because all the executives care about these days is IP, why else do you think Disney is going all in on sequels and Hollywood is finding any game to adapt it can, even if it’s a bit of a silly idea? Except, I don’t even know how Secret Level is meant to do that.
The first batch of episodes dropped this week, and I’ll be honest with you, I thought they were all a bit rubbish. The nicest thing I think I can say about any of them is that the Pac-Man episode (which we’ll come back to) was bold, and I wouldn’t even really say that if I’m being honest. Viewed at their worst, these episodes are fancy ads for their respective properties, but if we are looking at them that way, I think they failed on that front.
Kicking things off is the Dungeons & Dragons episode, a tabletop game that yes has its serious moments, but is widely known as a game where you roleplay doing the most ridiculous nonsense with your friends. Instead, we just got a clearly-meant-to-be epic battle sequence that I couldn’t have cared less about because I didn’t get to know any of the characters, and isn’t that the appeal of a world like that? It certainly didn’t encourage me to get my friends together and try it out.
None of the other episodes were very successful in getting me to check out their respective properties either, so then there’s the question of how do they stand on their own right? Well, not particularly well to be honest. Sifu’s episode was pretty, but just one long fight scene. Crossfire’s was so dull I was half on my phone the entire time. There was an attempt at comedy in New World’s, but it just fell flat. Not even Keanu Reeves could save the Armored Core episode which really was just a bunch of mechs fighting each other, and I eat that s**t up normally.
Not to be a parent in the late ’90s/ early aughts that doesn’t really get video games and just thinks that all the violence will poison their kids’ brains, but they were all just a bit violent too! Genuinely, it felt almost ironic how every single episode presented had some amount of gratuitous violence in one way or another. As a collective piece it felt like the very thing that assholes used to reduce video games too, it felt wholly detached from what games are and can be.
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Yes, there is a lot of violence in them, but the short run time for each episode deprives us of context that occasionally justifies that violence. I think I actually would have liked the Warhammer 40K episode, with its mysterious and atmospheric vibes, but when literally every episode is filled with violence too, there’s nothing to make it stand out. And when I say every episode, I mean every episode! Including the Pac-Man one.
The Pac-Man one might be the goriest of all, bar that Warhammer one, with the titular lip-flapper killing beasties in increasingly bloody ways before chowing down on their raw flesh. There’s the odd reference to the actual games like with a moment where he, a grey alien man, by the way, not the floating yellow orb you’d assume to be Pac-Man, eats some cherries. Get it! Pac-Man! It felt like a fan film, not that there’s anything wrong with fan films, it’s just that they can also be incredibly self-indulgent, and yes, sometimes pointlessly violent just for the sake of exploring the concept of Pac-Man, but edgy. “How revolutionary!” they write with the strongest hint of sarcasm possible.
Sure, there’s more episodes to come next week, but I really just don’t get the point of Secret Level as a series. Despite being days old, it’s already dated, a relic of a time that maybe never existed in the first place. But I suppose, if anything, we’ll at least get some idea of what Concord was meant to be like, for better or worse.
